LITENING Laser Designation Pod

LITENING LASER DESIGNATION POD

LITENING Laser Designation Pod

LITENING is an advanced airborne infrared targeting and navigation pod. Designed to improve both day and night attack capabilities, LITENING presents pilots with real-time, FLIR and CCD imagery. It is fully operational 24 hours a day and in adverse weather conditions. The LITENING design enables the fighter air crew to carry out the following missions/tasks:

• Laser spot detection
• Performance of low level night flights
• Identification of aerial targets from BVR ranges
• Detection/Recognition/Identification/Laser designation of surface targets
• Accurate delivery of laser guided bombs, cluster and general purpose bombs

In order to accomplish all these tasks, LITENING employs five main sensors located on a single optical bench in the forward section of LITENING:

LITENING components diagram

FLIR - LITENING uses a high performance FLIR with three Fields of View. The wide FOV is displayed on the head-up for navigation while Medium and Narrow FOVs are used for target selection and are displayed on a heads-down display.

CCD camera - The CCD camera significantly improves daytime performance when compared to the FLIR selection.

Laser designator / Range-finder - LITENING uses a 100 mJ laser to designate targets selected by the air crews and provides guidance to the laser guided bomb.

Laser spot designator - The laser spot detector detects the laser energy from a secondary source, enabling ground or airborne Forward Air Controllers (FACs) to designate the targets for the fighter aircraft. This feature is not present in any of the competitor pods.

Strap-down system - The SDS aligns LITENING to the aircraft line-of-sight electronically, improves target tracking and stabilizes the seeker.

All these sensors incorporated in a single pod provide the fighter aircrew with the flexibility to perform multiple missions and make LITENING the most cost effective solution available.